Manhattan, New York, United States
Joseph Stella studied at the Art Students League of New York.
Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella and Marcel Duchamp
Manhattan, New York, United States
Joseph Stella studied at the Art Students League of New York.
Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella and Marcel Duchamp
1913
1914
1918
1918
1920
1920
1924
1926
1931
1936
1939
Joseph Stella was born on June 13, 1877, in Muro Lucano, Provincia di Potenza, Basilicata, Italy. He was a son of Michael Stella and Maria Vincenza Filomena Stella. The fourth of five brothers, he was a pudgy, solitary, and contemplative child, with few friends his own age. He also had four sisters. His father and grandfather were attorneys, and their family was prosperous, though Stella showed little interest in pursuing the family vocation.
When Joseph Stella was nineteen, he went to America to study medicine and pharmacology. In 1897 he began to paint and enrolled as a full-time student at the Art Students League and then at the New York School of Art, studying under William Merritt Chase.
Stella's earliest painting emulates the manner of Chase, who admired Diego Velázquez, Édouard Manet, and Frans Hals and interpreted American subjects with breadth of handling and richness of palette. Stella made several drawings of immigrants and miners for the magazines Outlook and Survey.
By 1910 Stella was back in Europe. He spent about a year in Italy and then went to Paris, where he met Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and a number of the Italian futurists, including Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini. Stella's enthusiasm for their art was not immediately translated into his own work, but after he returned to the United States late in 1912 he began his first large futurist painting, Battle of Lights, Coney Island. In this picture, forms are fractured and faceted to form a phantasmagoria of fragmented amusement-park architecture, disembodied by light and bright colors. It owes much to Severini in its conception. When the painting was exhibited in New York City, knowing art patrons admired it, but the general reception was negative.
Stella refined and applied his futurist approach to the American industrial scene, glorifying it by lending to it a precisionist character not unlike that of Charles Sheeler and Niles Spencer.
In 1920 Stella executed his first "Brooklyn Bridge" painting. He was to return to the theme as late as 1939 in his Brooklyn Bridge: Variations on an Old Theme. In these two paintings the scintillating and iridescent light patterns and hyperbolic sweep of steel are fixed by a taut, overriding symmetrical composition.
Stella became an American citizen in 1923. He made numerous trips abroad during the 1920s and 1930s. Visits to North Africa and Barbados inspired him to depict the spirit of a tropical environment in lush color and strong, centrally located forms. He also composed small, delicate, and intimate collages somewhat in the spirit of Paul Klee and Arthur Dove. Stella's development as an artist was marked by impulsiveness and surprising shifts and turns. He died in New York City on November 5, 1946.
Joseph Stella is best known for his depictions of industrial America, especially his images of the Brooklyn Bridge. He was largely responsible for bringing Futurism to the United States, and was a leading figure in the burgeoning Precisionist movement of the 1920s and 1930s.
Stella's style also had a tremendous impact on later artists, including the Color Field paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, the post-Cubist works of Edgar Ewing, and the Abstract Realist urban scenes of De Hirsh Margules.
Stella is considered a vital figure in American art history, with his work being held among the collections of important institutions such as the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
A Vision
New York Interpreted V, The Bridge
Flowers, Italy
1931Knight of Roses
By-Products Plants
The Brooklyn Bridge
1939Brooklyn Bridge
1918Brooklyn Bridge
1920Palm Tree and Bird
New York
Factories
The Ox
Metropolitan Port
Battle of Lights, Coney Island
Bridge
1936Serenade, A Christmas Fantasy
Night View of Brooklyn Bridge
1918Apotheosis of the Rose
The Birth of Venus
The Red Hat
1924Tree of My Life
Tree of Nice
Men, women and crianзas around the world united around Jesus
Purissima
Brooklyn Bridge
Battle of Lights, Coney Island
Coney Island
The Amazon
1926Futurist Composition
1914The Virgin
The Bridge
1920Neapolitan Song
Luna Park
1913Smoke Stack
Quotations:
"During the last years of the war I went to live in Brooklyn in the most forlorn region of the oceanic tragic city, in Williamsburg, near the bridge. Brooklyn gave me a sense of liberation. The vast view of her sky, in opposition to the narrow one of New York, was a relief - and at night, in her solitude, I used to find, intact, the green freedom of my own self."
"There was in the air the glamor of a battle, the holy battle raging for the assertion of a new truth. My youth plunged full in it."
"Opposite my studio a huge factory - its black walls scarred with red stigmas of mysterious battles - was towering with the gloom of a prison. At night fires gave to innumerable windows menacing blazing looks of demons - while at other times vivid blue-green lights rang sharply in harmony with the radiant yellow-green alertness of cats enjewelling the obscurity around."
"I was thrilled to find America so rich with so many new motives to be translated into a new art. Steel and electricity had created a new world. A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violation of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity and a new polyphony was ringing all around with the scintillating, highly colored lights. The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes and expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers and with bridges made for the conjunction of worlds. A new architecture was created, a new perspective."
"Many nights I stood on the bridge - and in the middle alone - lost - a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness - crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers - here and there lights resembling suspended falls of astral bodies or fantastic splendors of remote rites - shaken by the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion, like blood in the arteries - at times, ringing as alarm in a tempest, the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires - now and then strange moanings of appeal from tugboats, guessed more than seen, through the infernal recesses below - I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new DIVINITY."
"At my arrival (in Paris), Fauvism. Cubism, and Futurism were in full swing. There was in the air the glamour of a battle, the holy battle raging for the assertion of a new truth. My youth plunged full in it."
Joseph Stella was married to May Geraldine French.
He was also known as John Stella.
William Merritt Chase was an American painter. He was known for his depictions of studio interiors, landscapes, and society portraits.
